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“... have noticed that when you express a feeling, it is on the point of disappearing.’ This comes as close as anything to defining the uncertainty principle that inhabits Constant’s perpetual self-analysis: when you locate its object, the object appears to vanish. The repeated fantasies of escape recorded in Constant’s diary acquire a more affirmative aspect ...”

“... her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell, about two years; and that the letters placed by Frank Churchill before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread, contained the word ‘pardon’. Of the good people in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion we know nothing more than what is written; for before those works were published their author had been taken ...”

“... up to and including testing, without having a human spy to witness it and tell us about it. He is frank about the numerous instances in which the whole detection apparatus failed, as it did in the first Soviet test of August 1949; the ‘Vela’ explosion in the South Atlantic in September 1979; the detonation by India of several devices, one ...”

“... as their criticisms are, I can’t go along with the ferocity of Ford’s detractors (they seem to close their eyes to watch his films), but David Thomson makes a mighty-seeming case against him in his Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. From the 1975 edition: Ford’s male chauvinism believes in uniforms, drunken candour, fresh-faced little women (though ...”

“... and his legacy. ‘Given Schumpeter’s emotional state – his diaries suggest that he was very close to a breakdown – marrying for a third time was one of the hardest things he ever did,’ McCraw comments. ‘But it would prove to be one of the wisest.’ These words make a fitting conclusion to Part 2 of the book, ‘The Adult, 1926-39’, which ...”

“... life so far as I am able to formulate it,’ he wrote. ‘Comradeship to me so far, an intensely close and all absorbing attachment for my men and boy friends, has been the one guiding principle in my life, and has inspired anything I may have been vouchsafed to accomplish in the nature of the influencing or the building up of character. There may be many ...”

“... on Newsweek when it was discovered that he was keeping files on his fellow journalists. (Like his close associate, Robert Moss, a former Thatcher speech-writer, de Borchgrave is obsessed with the infiltration of the Western press by alleged Soviet moles and has personally briefed President Reagan on the subject.) As early as 1982 de Borchgrave and the French ...”

“... gang, Gennady Petrov, had been a shareholder in the 1990s in Bank Rossiya, along with several close allies of Putin. After he became president, the bank was known as ‘Putin’s wallet’.) MI6 paid for some of Litvinenko’s work: £2000 a month from an unidentified bank account appears in his accounts among the family shopping at ...”

“... him just as well’. Even his closest associates found him hard to read. ‘You keep your cards close up against your belly,’ his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, complained. ‘You never put them on the table.’ Roosevelt played off one adviser against another as a matter of course. ‘Never let your left hand know what your right is doing,’ he told ...”

“... the city, who wanted to start communes in half-dead villages in the mountains, or in empty houses close to the coast. They were talking about vegetarianism and India and the right not to work if you didn’t want to. And others who became diehard nationalists and gathered in Plaza San Jaime on a Sunday evening, proudly doing their national dance in the same ...”

“... America was now the laboratory for a more stringent form of modernisation. Samuel Huntington was frank: ‘democracy,’ he wrote in 1989, ‘is clearly compatible with inequality in both wealth and income, and, in some measure, it may be dependent on such inequality.’ By the time the Berlin Wall came down that November, almost every Latin American country ...”

“... to Graystone, ‘Marshall’s money set the agenda of the Church under Welby.’ (A source close to Marshall said he has no influence on the Church of England or its politics.)Since 2018 Marshall has given £5 million to HTB through the Sequoia Trust, a charity he runs with his wife, Sabina de Balkany, a French-Hungarian antiques dealer, and his ...”

“... much matters: deterrence deterred and deterred both ways. It worked, for example, against plans by Frank Wisner of the CIA to commit paramilitary groups trained in West Germany to aid the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and it made the Russians generally cautious outside their own sphere. President Glafkos Cleridis of Cyprus has revealed that after the first ...”

“... reference to an alter ego, whose biography in a sense we are writing, and to whom we thus come as close as we can. The idea may sound fanciful, but it is pursued with remarkable force and fascination in Richard Holmes’s study. Richard Savage, the young Johnson’s alter ego, was a poor and talented writer whom Johnson had met in Grub Street. Each took a ...”

“... was an impassioned and lifelong militant for the cause of racial equality, and therefore for years close to the Communists. Though never in the Party – even the FBI satisfied itself of this after years of investigation – he was nevertheless (if I may quote my own memories of him) much more than the generic New Deal ‘progressive’ to which Stowe tries to ...”